Student Success

Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel and Frank Valcarcel, Cuttlesoft

Cuttlesoft is an award-winning creative product development agency with offices in Tallahassee, FL, and Denver, CO. They craft beautifully designed and highly scalable solutions for web, mobile, IoT, and the cloud. Founded in 2014 by FSU alumni and future husband and wife Emily Morehouse and Frank Valcarcel, Cuttlesoft began in earnest when they won a year of free co-working at Domi Station. After working their way up from desk, to office, to Westward expansion, the company now operates in three time zones and has worked with 20+ businesses and nonprofits to produce a versatile array of software products.

Maureen Isern, MOPED Productions

MOPED is a full-service video production and storytelling shop that intersects with technology to catalyze conversation, mobilize audiences and drive impact, both on and offline. We are a collection of digital strategists, directors, producers, editors, writers and artists, and we’ve seen our work help organizations achieve heightened visibility, elevated engagement and greater results. We develop stories into vehicles to compel action and change.

Joshua Esnard, The Cut Buddy

The idea, much like our flagship product, is simple: “People feel confident and have high self-esteem when they look good.”

When I was just 13 years old and unintentionally invented The Cut Buddy, a patented multi-curve maintenance edge up, line up, and shape up tool, I just wanted my haircut to look good. Through high school and college I noticed that all my friends wanted their haircuts and beards to look good too; there’s something about feeling confident in your looks that gives people high self-esteem and puts a little ‘pep’ in their step.

At The Cut Buddy, we’ve created something more than just a haircut template that allows people to look great daily. We give people confidence, we save them money, we make their lives easier. From the single mother who needs to save money on her children’s haircuts to the military personnel overseas without access to a barber to the disabled who struggle to do their own haircuts since their medicine makes their hands shake, we’ve solved a very common yet simple problem.

Now, 18 years later from it’s origin, that little cardboard cutout stencil I created has gone on to become the Amazon.com #1 Best Seller in the United States and Canada and has been featured in GQ Magazine, Forbes, the Huffington Post, Black Enterprise, Univision, and on NPR.

At The Cut Buddy, our goal is to enable people to have confidence and high self-esteem daily. Be it through community outreach with local youth groups or supplying them at a steeply discounted rate to our active service members overseas, we care about the way that people feel. Our priority is to enable every person the opportunity to feel great about themselves daily.

“Looking back, the FSU entrepreneurship major established the entrepreneurial mindset in me at an early age. With the help of FSU’s life-changing faculty, like Dr. Jim Dever, this mindset has since allowed me to develop an RFID inventory system for hospitals as well as to give back by consulting with over 125 startups. My goal is to one day consult with over 1,000 startups to teach them entrepreneurial principals, much like the ones I learned while at FSU.”